The girl wearily watched the men all through the night. She had a plan formulating in her head as to how to escape her fate of dying in the cage, but she didn’t know if she was fit enough to pull it off. She knew that her splendor was faded because of her starving. She also knew that the guards in the room were cocky men. They thought that just because a creature of the night was captured meant that it was no longer a threat. She was weak, and she was dying a slow and painful death as she was tied up in unbreakable chains and locked in a cage. But she planned on showing the men who exactly was the highest on the food chain.

The vampire had been captured for weeks. The only reason she knew that much – the room was windowless and she had nothing to keep track of the passing time except her exhausted mind – was because she knew her limits to regularly feeding, and she was so far past that limit. She could go only so many weeks before she would start to feel the draining effects of not hunting. Every vampire knew that if one weren’t to feed on something or someone’s blood after that time, they would slowly start dying until they fed once again. Vampires rarely dance upon that fine line to test and stretch their limits. This girl was being forced to travel on a path to her own demise, and she held a grudge that kept her from allowing herself to be wrapped up in her own self-pity. It kept her from letting death brush against her cheek and seduce her into submersion of the afterlife, as well.

Since the guards around her were as arrogant as they were, they felt that they could come and go as they pleased, providing there was one person who was there to watch the vampire prisoner. The current midnight group was no exception to the stereotype. There were four men, two who helped in her capture, one who helped bring her in, and a new guard who couldn’t have been older than his early twenties. The three older and more experienced men were discussing a food and coffee break while the new guard, John, was to watch the girl.

John, who had some common sense in his mind, argued that one of them should stay while he went with the other two. It wasn’t because he was selfish and wanted to get his food and coffee sooner than he would if he were to stay and be on guard duty, it was because he was afraid of the locked up creature. The girl would watch him shiver faintly whenever looking in her direction. She would meet his gaze and watch goosebumps prickle his skin while the hair on the back of his neck stiffened on end. She knew that she held a power over him that she had long lost to the other Hunters that guarded her day in and day out. She could – and would – use that to her advantage.

While John begged not to be left alone with her, the others laughed at him for being afraid of a creature that was no longer able to overpower anything. Every comment the men made angered the vampire more and more as her eyes narrowed to slits with a deathly look. John had caught that gaze for a brief second before quickly looking away. The vampire heard his heart race with fear and felt her heart swell a bit with satisfaction.

The vampire had watched the three older men file out of the room and leave her alone with the youngest of them all. They had left John alone with the vampire without even a glancing back, and the prisoner felt her hopes shoot to the sky for the first time since the Hunters humiliatingly captured her. She knew that she had lost some of her luster, as every vampire would if they were to be starved and deprived of blood, but she hoped that she hadn’t lost too much of it to flaw her plan. She knew that having John already fear her would help in her plans, but she couldn’t always be positive that intimidation would overrule his obeying the orders he was given. Lust and seduction were almost always a given once the victim was caught into it.

The vampire’s eyes held no mercy as she focused on the torture that the Hunters put her through every second of the day while they tried to break down her spirit. She focused on the bittersweet blood that she would soon feel slide down her throat to quench her thirst, along with the killings that would follow. She focused on triumphing over the egotistical men who dared to believe that she was no longer a hazard or menace. She focused on her inner animal instincts. They would surely guide her through her plan without a single defect.

When the door clicked shut, the vampire took a deep breath, straining to smell the blood of John. Her chest swelled as her filled her undead lungs, as she tried to fill her nostrils with the diminutive but intoxicating scent. Glancing over to the young guard in the room, she saw his brows knit together in confusion as to what she was doing. It only made her more confident in her actions.

Mustering up the most desiring voice that she could manage she called out the young guards name. The vampire could see him start to tremble through her long lashes. With a tiny smirk quirking her purple-painted lips, she beckoned the young man closer to her with lust visible in her gaze. He fell for the act the second his eyes met hers without a trace of hesitance, and the girl knew that she was going to win this fight.

The vampire got up to her feet shakily and shuffled to the cage bars to meet John. Now seeing him close up, she saw that his eyes were a deep blue and his hair was dirty blonde. The lighting in the room prevented her from seeing the meager details beforehand, along with the fact that her senses were slowly dying off.

Being a master at the art of seduction, the vampire pressed her body up against the bars in an attempt to get closer to the young man. Her lower lip stuck out in a pout as she looked at John with yearning eyes. Without having to say anything, the man was hypnotized into going to the entrance of the cage and unlocking it with the set of keys that he had. The girl’s smirk returned as she stumbled up to her prey and pressed herself against him. No words were needed for him to started taking the chains off of the vampire with glazed eyes.

As soon as the metal was off of the vampire she lurched towards the unsuspecting and mesmerized young man. The spell that she held over him vanished, but he didn’t have time to fight back before she pounced on him like a lion on a gazelle. With her white fangs protruding past her purple lips, she laughed at her prey’s terrified look as he begged her to let him go free.

“Now, now my dear,” she hissed bringing her lips close to John’s neck. “Don’t look so scared. All I’m going to do is drain you of every last drop of blood in your veins.”

The vampire’s wicked laugh echoed through the room, and covered John’s choked scream. Not but a second later, the vampire sank her fangs into John’s soft flesh. Immediately, she felt the rush of blood spill onto her lips. She drank it in eagerly, making sure not to miss a single drop of the liquid. It took her a few minutes, and John struggled against her all the while, but she finally felt his body go limp with lifelessness. She was sad that the struggle was over, it was her favorite part about feeding, but she was almost done draining him anyway.

When the young man was limp with death, the vampire felt all of her anger towards the men burst from the cage she had locked it in. With an animalistic scream, she threw the body at the bars of the prison she had lived in for weeks. A sickening crunch could be heard as bones broke against the tough metal – the same metal her chains were made of. The vampire bared her teeth and growled as she pounced on the gurgling man, who was hanging onto life by a slender thread. After raising her hand high above her head, she brought it down with lightning speed and clawed at the man’s chest with a warrior’s cry. She left four gaping gashes, one of them revealing cracked rib bones while the others revealed his internal organs. She picked up the dying body by digging her nails into the skin and slammed it against the cage bars with a poisonous glower. John still had an ounce of life in him, and she was going to make sure that it was the most painful strain he had ever experienced.

“Get a taste of how we feel when you kill us you filthy hunter,” she hissed into his ear. Without a second to spare, she reared back and grabbed the man’s head, twisted it to break the spinal cord, and ripped the skin apart. The man’s body fell to the ground in an ashen heap while the vampire held onto his head by the mass of hair.

When the girl was done, panting heavily and alternating between clenching and unclenching her fist, she threw John’s head aside. She wiped the blood off her lips, accidentally taking some lipstick with it, onto the back of her hand. She had already started getting some pigment back into her skin. With her strength already beginning to return to her, the vampire stepped out of the cage and sat down in one of the chairs that her guards would occasionally sit in if they got tired of standing. With her legs crossed, she waited as still as a statue for the men to return from their small outing.

Like she told them before, they would be the first of many to die now that she was no longer caged. She always kept her promises.